suggestion: filter by asignment state about moodle-block_course_overview_campus

[abias]

Dear Mitchell,

thank you very much for proposing an improvement to our plugin!

Your request sounds plausible to me, it's a request taken from "real life".
Nevertheless, I don't know if I can implement such a feature in course_overview_campus.

1. Under the hood, course_overview_campus asks all activities in all my courses if they have something to show in the course overview list. Some activities will answer and tell that they have some news to show, for example new assignments. This is a Moodle core feature, not my implementation. So, news about assignments is just one of many activities which are handled by course_overview_campus. If I implement some special treatment for assignments in course_overview_campus, I can foresee that someone else wants special treatment for e.g. forum activities.
2. There is no simple way to differentiate the state of an assignment. course_overview_campus just gets plain text information about the assignment activity in a certain course. To differentiate the state (to implement a state filter or color highlighting), I would have to make checks to the plain text returns. This will be working for a certain Moodle version, but I'm afraid that it won't be bulletproof and can break with a future Moodle version.

So, summing up, I'm afraid that I won't be able to implement your request at the moment. As my time for feature requests is limited, I am going to close this issue now. Sorry...

Alex

[mvgerwen]

Hello Alexander,

Thank you for your quick reaction. It is to bad that it isn't simple to implement such a feature. But thanks anyway for looking at this.

I have said to teh students that they use the ctrl+f in the browser and look for the tekst. in chrome and IE the founded text will be highlighted :)

[mvgerwen]

Hello Alexander,

I have introduced that filter on teacher feature to the students. They like it, because the list is much shorter now, and you can search information more specific now. I am wondering if it is possible to filter on course instead on teacher?

if not, and you have to program it and you don't have time for it. don't feel psuhed, I won't blame you :) we will look for another solution :) Thanks anyway.

[abias]

I'm sorry that I don't understand the purpose of a "filter on course" filter? This filter would always have exactly one item as filter result, am I right? Could you please explain in more details what you want to achieve?

[mvgerwen]

The students can filter on "teacher". But is it possible to filter on "course" instead of "teacher"?

[abias]

Yes, I did understand this. The purpose of a filter is to reduce the amount of courses in my course list based on a common criteria like "courses of teacher x" or "courses in summer term". If I create a filter which lets you filter the course list by course name, the filter options will be as long as the whole course list and the filter will reduce the course list to exactly one item. This doesn't make sense to me.

[mvgerwen]

aah I see your point, you are right about that. What our students mean is. the teacher name is related to a course. but if a teachers teaches two different courses. the students see the two courses at once. so if teh filter filters on course instead of teacher. You have the following sitiation:

let me say the course filter exists of:"Maths, English, history, geographics"
if teh students picks maths in the filter. they see only the maths assignments.

if let us say teacher John Doe is a Math and History teacher. the students see all the assigmnets of math and history. but maybe they are only nterested in Math at that moment. and if you can filter on course. you don't have to think which teacher belongs to what course.

Do you understand what I mean? :)

If it is to diffucult to implement such feature. then we have bad luck :)

[abias]

OK and now I see your point.

I don't know how the filter should know if a course is a maths, english or history course. It may be possible to do this with the Moodle tags feature, but neither did I work with the tags feature yet, nor is it supported in block_course_overview_campus yet.

Did you have a look a block_course_overview_campus's category filter? It shows the parent category of the courses in the course list, if there are multiple categories which have the same name, they can be collapsed into one filter item.

Example:

Your category tree:
Root

• 1st grade
  --- Maths
  ----- Course "Math for beginners"
  ----- Course "Special Math problems for beginners"
  --- English
  ----- Course "English for beginners"
  ----- Course "Business English for beginners"
  --- History
  ----- Course "History for beginners"
• 2nd grade
  --- Maths
  and so on

If you have a category tree like that, the category filter would show you the filter items
Maths
English
History
and a student who is enrolled in "English for beginners" and "Business English for beginners" could filter his course list to english courses by selecting english.

Perhaps this works for you.

[mvgerwen]

Hello Alexander,

Thank you! I think this is a solution for this. Either way, with that teacher filter they can specific search enough. We don't wan't them to get lazy.

Thank you for thinking about this with me :D

[abias]

You're welcome :)